# Balancing gravity and growth

Growth is an essential part of a community's evolution. Growth brings new
members, new ideas, and new energy. It prevents stagnation. And of course, more
members means more impact that the community has, and the more ambitiously it
can pursue its mission.

Growth can also threaten a community. Growth can come from the wrong source or
at the wrong time. A community needs to be _ready_ to grow, with a plan in place
for how to onboard and integrate reasonably-sized cohorts of new members.
Premature growth can lead to frustration, chaos, a dilution of values, and even
the departure of long-term, highly trusted members.

The Orbit Model and the concept of [gravity](../gravity) can help you understand
if it's the right time to grow, or if it's the right time to wait and focus on
gravity instead. The determination is based on how well growth has been absorbed
historically and the trajectories that recently added members have been taking.

Is gravity increasing as new members become more committed and present? Great! You should have no problem adding new members to the community.

On the other hand, are most new members stalling in outer orbits with little to non progression? You might be better served increasing gravity before driving more growth.

## Determine baselines

Historical baselines for common growth-related metrics will help us understand
what's been happening to date and help us spot deviations in the future.

### Community size

Start with establishing a baseline for your the size of your community based on monthly active community members.

Of course, "active community member" can mean different things to different communities, so we suggest using orbit levels to define the minimum threshold for what "active" means for you.

In an open source community, the baseline could sound something like "we have 500
monthly active members, where a member is anyone who's opened at least one issue
and therefore is in our Orbit 3." If the next month there are 550 monthly
active members, we know the community has a 10% monthly growth rate.

### New members

Using the same logic as for community size, you can create a baseline for new
members in a given time period. These are members who join and reach the minimum
orbit level. An example baseline sounds like: "our community has been adding 25 new
members per month, each of whom has met our milestone for being considered a member".

Unlike community size, the number of new members isn't influenced by existing members
increasing or decreasing their activity.

## Readiness to grow

With those baselines in place, the next step is to look at how many members the
community is able to move from outer to inner orbit levels.

Let's assume that in the previous month, 25 community members moved up from
Orbit 4 to Orbit 3. If that went well, we could imagine that adding 25 more
members next month will be okay because, in effect, there are 25 new "slots" for
new members to fill. However, if we add 25 more, and only 10 move up next month,
we may have hit a bottleneck.

This analysis can be done between any 2 orbit levels to
assess whether a level is ready to receive new members. Everything needs to move
together.

Whether members remain at the levels they move up to is another
important question. If they don't, it may also signal a lack of readiness at
that level. This will be reflected in the community's gravity, which takes into
account inward and outward movements.

#### A delicate balance

This is how growth and gravity connect. The better the community is at moving
members inward, the more space it will have to receive new members and to have
members progress up.

In practice, this is true because communities are not
audiences: they rely on person-to-person connections to function. Since a human
being can only sustain and nurture so many connections, it's important that
enough members move toward the inner circle to avoid those already there being
overwhelmed with incoming members.

This is the delicate balance that a sustainable
community must strike.
